Innovator of the Week: Bruce Spiess, an anesthesiologist devises respirator mask made from existing hospital materials

When people are under pressure to find solutions to problems, it just takes one person to come up

with a brilliant idea. Just read this story about an anesthesiologist in Florida who found a way to re-use material to make protective masks during this pandemic. The story appeared in the Miami Herald on April 1. Here's this week's Innovator>>

Medical workers face big mask shortage. This UF doctor came up with way to make many

Link to full story Miami Herald, 4-1-20 

Bruce Spiess, an anesthesiologist at the University of Florida Health, woke up in the middle of the night with an idea.

Stocks of N95 respirator masks were already dwindling at his department. Anxiety grew among staff members over how to protect medical employees in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his overnight epiphany, Spiess, who has specialized in open heart surgeries for nearly 40 years, zeroed in on a thin blue fabric that is used to wrap sterile surgical instruments to protect them from airborne contamination. Under normal circumstances, this piece of cloth, the Halyard 600, ends up in the trash as soon as doctors unwrap the instruments they need.

But it occurred to Spiess that night almost two weeks ago that perhaps hospitals could give the Halyard 600 a second life.

“We have right in our hands, all the time, in every hospital. We have a material that’s really pretty impervious to bacteria,” said Spiess, 65. “Don’t know about viruses, but pretty impervious to bacteria, extremely impervious to dust and I wondered if we could create masks that way.”

So they did.

They picked apart an N95 mask to look at what it had inside. They made several prototypes and tested 20 different people with a saffron spray to confirm few particles entered through the mask. In a matter of one week, Spiess had rallied surgeons, nurses, janitors, engineers, scrub techs, costume designers and others in the Gainesville community to sew the masks. Out of every sheet of Halyard 600, which is made of polypropylene, volunteers can make 36 masks.

As officials with the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention are weighing whether to recommend that everyone cover their face outside regardless of symptoms, more citizens are taking to creative Do-It-Yourself mask-making. But most masks at home are not engineered with Halyard 600 or undergo the rigorous quality-control of the masks being purposed for UF’s medical staff.

UF Health workers are crafting masks out of materials.  

Every person who receives one of the UF masks needs to be fit-tested, and their mask will be labeled with their name. Each mask would ideally work for 96 hours, or four days. After every 24-hour cycle, each mask has to be sterilized with U.V. lighting before it is re-used. As of Tuesday, none of the hundreds of masks that have already been sewn had been handed out, as they waited to be sterilized and fit-tested.

Still, the masks are not meant to be a direct replacement for N95 masks. Spiess warns the current models are not being professionally manufactured, even though they are being checked for quality.

The project has also joined efforts with Gainesville Covid Masks, a collaboration of dozens of community leaders who were making masks out of cloth and experimenting with other materials.

“Today is a big day for me, I’ve got between 400 and 500 masks coming in today and I need to quality control and arrange for pickup,” said Georgetta Graham, a 63-year-old retired Gainesville resident who designed the two mask designs thought up by Spiess and his team at UF Health. “It’s a little bit wild, but they need them yesterday and we need to take care of our medical staff,” Graham said.

As the effort grows, more hospitals have expressed interest in making masks. Graham made tutorial videos explaining how to make the two prototypes of the protective masks on the UF website.
ABOUT BRUCE SPEISS: from the website https://anest.ufl.edu/profile/spiess-bruce/

Dr. Bruce Spiess. Credit; UFL.edu

Dr. Spiess joined us as a Professor of Anesthesiology and Associate Chair for Research. He was born to academic parents and grew up steeped in a research background, as his father was a geneticist and his mother was a biochemist. He attended Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where in 2017 he earned their highest honor, the Alumni citation, for his research work in medicine. He attended Rush Medical College in Chicago, followed by the Mayo Clinic for anesthesiology training, where he specialized in cardiothoracic anesthesiology and was chief resident.

Dr. Spiess returned to Rush for his first faculty position in 1983 and stayed until 1990. From there, he travelled to Seattle to become the Chief of Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology at the University of Washington. He eventually took the position of Vice Chairman of Anesthesiology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he stayed for 17 years until pursuing his present position at the University of Florida.

Dr. Spiess has focused on his research efforts on blood – its critical oxygen-carrying capacity, oxygen therapeutic pharmaceutical development (previously known as “blood substitutes”), the risks of blood transfusion, coagulation/coagulopathy, and developing monitoring technologies. His extensive work in the risks of blood transfusion has led him to be an outspoken proponent of patient blood management. He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed academic articles, more than 40 book chapters, 7 textbooks, and he has appeared on the Discovery Channel and other media. His work has been funded mostly by the U.S. Department of Defense, and he has led major conferences for the DOD, NIH, and FDA regarding critical blood issues. As it pertains to coagulation management, Dr. Spiess was the first to author research studies pertaining to the use of thromboelastography for heart surgery, and he has published extensively in that area, calling on clinicians to develop and utilize whole blood testing in conjunction with algorithms for coagulopathy treatment. He has been on the board of directors of various academic societies, including the Society for Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists as well as the boards of commercial companies.